Life in the Sonnets

Abstract

We begin with the passions of the critic as they are forged and explored in Shakespeare. These books speak directly from that funda-mental experience of losing and remaking yourself in art. This does not imply, necessarily, a lonely existentialism, the story of a self is always bound up in other stories, shared tales of nations or faiths, or of families large and small. But such stories are also always singular, irreducible to the generalities by which they are typically explained. Here, then, is where literary experience stops pretending to institu-tionalized objectivity, and starts to tell its own story.